Jonathan Sacks Morality Quotes

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.

I fear for the future of the West if it loses its faith. You cannot defend Western freedom on the basis of moral relativism, the only morality left when we lose our mooring in a sacred ontology or a divine-human covenant. No secular morality withstood Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. No secular morality today has the force to withstand the sustained onslaught of ruthless religious extremism. Neither market economics nor liberal democracy has the power, in and of itself, to inspire people to make sacrifices for the common good.

Theology creates an anthropology. Discovering God, singular and alone, the first monotheists discovered the human person singular and alone. Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises. It takes the good and bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would otherwise be war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul. ‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’ This is the moral drama that has been monotheism’s contribution to the civilisation of the West: not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.

I realised that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to recover.

It is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity - by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.

There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them ‘the covenant with Noah’ and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…

When everything is available, every lifestyle on offer, when all you have is freedom, but nothing to guide you in that freedom, “it’s not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life, you have trouble even staying focused on the question.

Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the otherwise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self-interest alone. I-based societies all eventually die. Ibn Khaldun showed this in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth. Other-based societies survive. Morality is not an option. It’s an essential.

I recently read in the Wall Street Journal an article by Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi. Among other things, he writes: … ‘There are large parts of [the world] where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you’re worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’ My brothers and sisters, this—unfortunately—describes much of the world around us. Do we wring our hands in despair and wonder how we’ll ever survive in such a world? No. Indeed, we have in our lives the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we know that morality is not passé, that our conscience is there to guide us, and that we are responsible for our actions.

Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world’s first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.

I find it exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty – to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expect it least.

Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: “It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public.”[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:

To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos—and the result is inevitably destructive.

is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

Physically, the taller you are the more you look down on others. Morally, the reverse is the case. The more we look up to others, the higher we stand. For us, as for God, greatness is humility.

The corrupt not only believe they can fool their fellow humans; they believe they can fool God as well. When moral standards begin to break down in business, finance, trade, and politics, a kind of collective madness takes hold of people. The sages said Adam bahul al mamono (Pesaĥim 11b), meaning, roughly, “Money makes us do wild things.

There are, however, dangers in covenantal politics. First, it can lead to overconfidence, the belief that “God is on our side.” This was the message of the false prophets whom Jeremiah denounced in his day. Second, it can lead to moral self-righteousness. People can come to think: We are the chosen or almost chosen people, therefore we are morally better than the rest. The prophet Malachi addresses this with biting irony: “From where the sun rises to where it sets, My name is great among the nations…but you profane it” (Mal. 1:11–12).

You do not need numbers to enlarge the spiritual and moral horizons of humankind. You need other things altogether: a sense of the worth and dignity of the individual, of the power of human possibility to transform the world, of the importance of giving everyone the best education they can have, of making each feel part of a collective responsibility to ameliorate the human condition.

From monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and powerless gain.

The French psychologist Jacques Lacan argued that the sense of an ‘I’ closely corresponded to the mass manufacture of glass mirrors.3 All roads in the late seventeenth century, writes historian Christopher Hill, led to individualism: ‘More rooms in better-off houses, use of glass in windows . . . replacement of benches by chairs –

Once you can identify an enemy, reactivate a chosen trauma and unite all factions in fear and hate of a common threat, you activate the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala with its instant and overwhelming defensive reactions, and render a culture susceptible to a pure and powerful dualism in which you are the innocent party and violence becomes both a justified revenge and the necessary protection of your group. The threefold defeat of morality then follows.

We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue.

First, in the seventeenth century, came the secularisation of knowledge in the form of science and philosophy. Then in the eighteenth century came the secularisation of power by way of the American and French Revolutions and the separation – radical in France, less doctrinaire in the United States – of church and state. In the nineteenth century came the secularisation of culture as art galleries and museums were seen as alternatives to churches as places in which to encounter the sublime. Finally in the 1960s came the secularisation of morality, by the adoption of a principle first propounded by John Stuart Mill a century earlier – namely that the only ground on which anyone, including the state, is justified in intervening in behaviour done in private is the prevention of harm to others. This was the beginning of the end of traditional codes of ethics, to be replaced by the unfettered sanctity of the individual, autonomy, rights and choice.

A free society is a moral achievement. That is the central insight of the Torah. It depends on the existence of a shared moral code, a code we are taught by our parents, a code we internalise in the course of growing up, a code for whose maintenance we are collectively responsible. Today, throughout much of the West, morality has been largely outsourced to governments and regulatory bodies. The

What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham’s servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob’s son, not an Egyptian of loose morals. Moses is a prophet, not a priest. To say yes to who we are, we have to have the courage to say no to who we are not. Pain

cooperation is as necessary as competition, that cooperation depends on trust, that trust requires justice, and that justice itself is incomplete without forgiveness. Morality is not simply what we choose it to be. It is part of the basic fabric of the universe, revealed to us by the universe’s Creator, long ago.

Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.

That is why the market and the state, the fields of economics and politics are arenas of competition, while morality is the arena of cooperation. A society with only competition and very limited cooperation will be abrasive and ruthless, with glittering prizes for the winners and no consolation for the losers.

A 2017 summary of the study concluded: ‘Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.’29

The pinnacle of the moral life, to which we should all aspire, is precisely to do what is right because it is right, because that is what it is to walk in God’s ways. That is why the key word of Deuteronomy is shema, the word that is untranslatable precisely because it covers this multiplicity of senses from simple obedience to deep internalisation. As we grow and mature, we move from thinking of commands as hypothetical imperatives to thinking of them as categorical, and we move from heteronomy to autonomy, because we have made God’s will our will.

But few nations other than Israel set it as their highest task to understand why the law is as it is. Shema is the Torah’s call to moral growth.

No one emerges well in this story, which is there to tell us that in the long run, individual piety is unsustainable without collective moral responsibility.

Life expectancy in the UK in 1900 was forty-seven years for men, fifty for women, and in 2017, seventy-nine years for men and eighty-three for women, an increase of between two and three extra years in every decade. We are, quite simply, better off, better-informed, healthier and freer than any previous generation.

If this is so, then the placement of the Mishkan at the heart of the camp suggests that societies need, in the public domain, a constant reminder of the presence of God. That, after all, is why the Mishkan appears in Exodus, not Genesis. Genesis is about individuals, Exodus about societies. Significant thinkers believed likewise. John Locke, the pioneer of toleration, thought so. He considered that atheists were ineligible for English citizenship since membership was gained by swearing an oath of allegiance, and an oath, being a vow to God, could not be sworn by an atheist.[10] In his farewell address, George Washington said: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.[11

In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients.[16] In a recent, magisterial work on justice, Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued the same proposition on philosophical grounds.[17] Our whole Western concept of justice, founded on the idea of human rights, is built on religious foundations and cannot survive without them. If we become a secular society, there is no long-term future for either rights or justice. This is his conclusion: Our Judaic and Christian heritage neither denies nor overlooks the flaws of humankind; some strands in the heritage appear even to revel in them. But in the face of all the empirical evidence, it nonetheless declares that all of us have great and equal worth; the worth of being made in the image of God and of being loved redemptively by God. It adds that God holds us accountable for how we treat each other – and for how we treat God. It is this framework of conviction that gave rise to our moral subculture of rights. If this framework erodes, I think we must expect that our moral subculture of rights will also eventually erode and that we will slide back into our tribalisms.[18

Part of the motive behind devolution was to allow those different identities to be expressed. But what had taken the place of the country house was not a home but a hotel: 'You pay for services rendered and in return you get a room, you get room services - beyond that, you are free to do whatever you like so long as you don't disturb the other guests.' But this model failed to generate loyalty. 'A hotel is somewhere you don't belong. It isn't a home. It's a convenience. And therefore when society becomes a hotel, as it has become in the past fifty years, you get no sense of national identity, of belonging, of common history, of common good, of moral concerns, of social solidarity - and that is where we are now.' [Quoting Jonathan Sacks.]

The alternative to morality is violence. Violence is the attempt to satisfy my desires at the cost of yours.

Tolstoy’s point is subtle and substantive. When people begin to lose their religious convictions, often the first thing they stop doing is observing religious rituals. The last thing they lose is their moral beliefs. A whole generation of mid-Victorian English intellectuals, most famously George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, lost their Christian faith but held fast to their Christian ethics.13 But that, implies Tolstoy, cannot last for ever. New generations appear for whom the old moral constraints no longer make sense, and they go. Moralities may be a long time dying but, absent the faith on which they are based,

. Instead we hear a constant insistence that the strength of a nation – certainly of Israel/Judah – is not military or demographic but moral and spiritual. If the people keep faith with God and one another, no force on earth can defeat them. If they do not, no force can save them.

This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The question does not arise.

the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to “one very simple principle,” in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.

The choice – God is saying – is in your hands. You are free to do what you choose. But actions have consequences. You cannot overeat and take no exercise, and at the same time stay healthy. You cannot act selfishly and win the respect of other people. You cannot allow injustices to prevail and sustain a cohesive society. You cannot let rulers use power for their own ends without destroying the basis of a free and gracious social order. There is nothing mystical about these ideas. They are eminently intelligible. But they are also, and inescapably, moral.

One of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.